Nick Fletcher PH317

Explain and Assess a Particular Argument in Favor of the Language of Thought

Hypothesis

The language of thought hypothesis (henceforth LOTH) postulates that

thinking occurs through a mental language that uses a ‘combinatorial syntax (and
semantics)’ (Ayede, 2004; pgh.1) to arrange a finite number of mental states, or
representations, into complex thoughts. This position has been supported and
furthered by many philosophers, most notably Fodor who was the first to postulate
such a theory. This essay shall focus upon the argument for LOTH postulated by
Lycan in his 1993; in which he argues that LOTH is both empirical and obvious, and
that his argument is not ‘brute a priorism’ (pp.406) but a clear deductive argument
that shows LOTH to be correct.
Firstly, he draws a similarity between language and thinking in terms of its
‘unboundedness’. In linguistics there is the ‘morphemes-plus-compositional-rules
theory’ (Lycan, 1993; pp.406), which explains how we are able to both construct and
comprehend an infinite number of sentences on the spot; using a finite number of
sounds or morphemes arranged first in words and then sentences, according to
syntactical rules, first vocabulary and then grammar. This is known as the
‘unboundedness of understanding’ (Lycan, 1993; pp.406). In terms of thought, it
appears that thought is also unbounded as we can have any kind of thoughts about
anything. Whilst this is an ‘unobjectionably vague feature’ of thinking, this does not
detract from its worth in Lycan’s argument (Lycan, 1993; pp.408). Thus Lycan
postulates the first premise of his argument:

Premise 1: unboundedness of thinking.

Secondly, Lycan invokes the concept of physicalism about thinking. Physicalism of

the mind is fast becoming the consensus among philosophers, both because of
recent advances in cognitive neuroscience, and because the alternatives do not offer
explanations of mental function, but ‘mystery and an appeal to magic’ (Lycan, 1993;
pp.408). Thus Lycan postulates the second premise of his argument:

Premise 2: physicalism of thinking.

Lycan then uses these two premises to arrive at his third premise; if thinking is
indeed unbounded, and every thought a human being has must be token-identical
with some physical property of the brain, there must be a finite stock of physical
properties that can be conjoined to form an infinite number of thoughts. Thus:

-1-
Nick Fletcher PH317

Premise 3: There must be a series of rules that allow a finite number of atomic
elements to form an infinite number of complex thoughts in the mind-brain.

Lycan’s fourth and final premise simply states his final conclusion from these three
premises, here repeated in full:

Premise 4: ‘Human beings have systems of physical states, and/or host physical
events, that serve as semantically primitive elements of a lexicon, and human beings
(somehow) physically realize rules that combine strings of those elements into
configurations having arbitrarily complex propositional contents in virtue of the
semantic values of the primitives’ having been projected by the principles of
composition.’ (1993; pp.409)

Which essentially states that all human thought takes place through the arrangement
of a finite number of mental manifestations into complex states in the brain; this
occurs via a system compositional rules in a similar way to how words are arranged
into sentences in speech according to syntactical rules. The premises are simple and
clear, especially when framed in the linguistic metaphor, but whether the argument
holds or not is a matter of some contention.
Before considering some of the philosophical problems within this account,
this essay shall consider the leading competitor to the representational LOTH,
connectionism (Lycan, 1993). Lycan argues that the connectionist view is highly
compatible with his but that some connectionists may wish to reject premise 3, the
Chomskyan argument that there must be a system of rules to get an infinite number
of thoughts from a finite number of atomic elements (Lycan, 1993); they may
postulate a connectionist architecture instead. Lycan appeals to the example of
NETtalk, a connectionist program that consists of a general and topic-neutral learning
algorithm in order to refute this objection. NETtalk was given no rules of phonology
nor representations that act as any kind of rules whatsoever, yet the program was
able to audibly pronounce any English word from text after training. At first this lent
huge support to the connectionist viewpoint, but after highly abstract statistical
analysis it was found that in learning how to pronounce words NETtalk had developed
its own set of rules; rules that described all the phonemes of English language
exactly, even dividing sounds into vowels and consonants. Thus the connectionist,
by his own experiment, cannot argue against premise 3 and the major opponent to
LOTH does not refute Lycan’s premises (Lycan, 1993).
However, the question remains whether thinking is better explained as

-2-
Nick Fletcher PH317

occurring through a connectionist architecture of input and output, or a

representationalist framework of representations and recursive rules. Lycan does not
provide a conclusive answer to this question in his paper; he states that thinking is
‘not a matter of turning an input into an output, even thought it is functionally
specified ultimately in terms of inputs and outputs and other psychological states’
(1993; pp.417), but does not actually provide any basis for this assumption. Indeed,
surely this is exactly what the connectionist believes, that thinking is simply the
conversion of inputs into outputs via complex algorithms, and further is why the
connectionist differs from the representationalist on this theory. But despite the weak
nature of this particular argument, Lycan posits a stronger argument against
connectionism that if thinking is simply the transformation of inputs into outputs, the
unboundedness of thinking premise cannot hold; unless the connectionist concedes
that the connectionist machine of thinking has a finite number of physical states
through which it could implement an unlimited number of thoughts (Lycan, 1993).
Therefore, if premise 2 is accepted, and Lycan’s argument for it is indeed persuasive,
either the connectionist must become a kind of representationalist, or their argument
fails.
Thus Lycan’s argument stands up well to its strongest rival, but this in itself is
not reason to accept the theory, an analysis of the argument itself must be made.
Stalnaker (1993) has provided the most thorough analysis of Lycan’s argument, and a
few of his main grievances shall be considered here. He argues that the ‘brainwriting
metaphor,’ from which the language of thought hypothesis has been conceived,
cannot be taken literally enough to support Lycan’s argument that the language of
thought hypothesis is empirical and obvious. The brainwriting metaphor is that the
action of thinking or making judgment occurs through a sort of internal conversation,
and that ‘coming to believe that p’ involves moving a ‘mental sentence token’ that p
into your ‘belief box’ (Stalnaker, 1993; pp.426). Stalknaker attempts to do this
through two thought experiments, the first of which shall be considered here. He
describes a search routine in a word processor program in which the program only
reads the second letter of the word if the first letter matches the search. In this
situation, the program does not need to store the information that the first letter
matches in memory before proceeding, and Stalnaker argues that this type of
information processing does not necessarily fit inside the brainwiriting metaphor. He
argues that the metaphor could be stretched in order to accommodate this situation,
but certain assumptions implicit within the metaphor, essentially assumptions about
psychosemantics, are unacceptable.
It is reasonable to assume that some of our mental functions take place in a
similar manner to this program (well argued by Stalnaker, 1993); however, whether

-3-
Nick Fletcher PH317

this system of information processing can be described as representation is not clear.

Stalnaker argues that if it can, the linguistic metaphor is less accurate than
representationalists make it out to be, and if it cannot the linguistic metaphor is less
obvious than Lycan suggests. Lycan writes that a representational state ‘may be
diffuse and highly distributed rather than modular or physically salient as public
linguistic tokens are’ (1993; pp.405. Cited by Stalnaker, 1993; pp.426), which
suggests that he believes the example above is one of representation. So the
question becomes whether or not the linguistic metaphor is fitting as an analogy of
representation. In contrary to Stalnaker, it would seem the answer is surely yes, as
there are countless examples where a similar process occurs in everyday language.
The best example is that of possessives; if two people are talking about a certain
object in conversation, for example a new car, once the owner of that car is
established it will not need to be reinforced, the information will be ‘stored’ in the
‘program’ of the conversation. To clarify, the program of the conversation is the
subject and context, the car, its features etc., it governs how the conversation
progresses; the language used is analogous to the representations that make up a
complex thought; the complex thought is the conversation itself. This ‘storing’ of the
possessive information, of whom owns the car, does not need to be actively stored in
separate memory, just as in the program, but it is no less a part of the system as a
whole. Furthermore, it is of no consequence that the ‘representations’ of this example
are ‘diffuse and highly distributed’ (Lycan, 1993; pp.405). Thus it seems that
Stalnaker’s pessimistic handling of the brainwrtiting metaphor is undue in this case.
Another argument that Stalnaker presents against Lycan attacks the idea that
the systematic rules of thought can only be explained through a language analogy.
He asks us to imagine a map of New England, and points out that parts of the map
represent parts of New England, and relations between parts of the map represent
relations between parts of the region according to specific rules. He then lists a few
propositions that such a map might represent. Two such propositions are that ‘most
of Massachusetts is north of all Connecticut’ and ‘some parts of Massachusetts are
farther south than some parts of Connecticut’ (pp.429). He argues that as the map
represents this information in a very different way to how the sentences represent it,
and thus it is possible that intentional mental states could have the complexity and
richness they seem to have by another process than one analogous to language; in
this case one analogous to a picture or map.
However, this idea seems severely flawed. Although the manner in which the
map represents the information is very different to way the sentences describing the
map do, this in itself is not grounds for believing that mental representations can
have a map like structure. Firstly, the map analogy limits mental representation to

-4-
Nick Fletcher PH317

representations of spatial relations within and between objects. Secondly, even if an

intimidatingly complex or large number of propositions is required, language can be
used to describe all the information that the map is able to represent. This is
highlighted by Stalnakers use of propositions to describe the map in his argument.
Whilst it is true that ‘the compositional semantic structure of a clause saying what is
represented need [not] have anything to do with the compositional structure of the
representation being described’ (Stalnaker, 1993; pp.429), it is also true that a
language-based representation can describe anything that a map-based
representation could, but a map-based representation is unable to describe
everything that a language-based representation could. And as maps (including
charts or graphs) are the only structured way of representing information
systematically and pictorially, it is very unlikely that thought occurs through map-like
representations.
Whilst by no means an exhaustive list of potential concerns, the arguments
above highlight the robustness of Lycan’s treatment of LOTH. One argument not
found in the literature that adds further support to LOTH concerns the two-way
explanation that an analogy between thought and language provides. It could be
argued that the unboundedness of understanding comes out of the unboundedness
of thinking because language is simply a direct translation of thought to sound. This
direct translation can only be direct if both thought and language occur by a similar
process; a process that must where thoughts are represented either in the mind-brain
or in words by specific tokens, arranged according to a systematic set or rules or
syntax because this is what is found in language. Furthermore, with this argument in
mind LOTH could shed light on the philosophical debate on how human beings have
come to have language. The general consensus among modern philosophers is that
language is innate, but it could be that language as we know it is not of itself innate,
just inevitable in virtue of the fact that thought is innate. Whilst this argument clearly
needs further analysis, it is an interesting and intuitively appealing idea that lends
great weight to LOTH.
To conclude, Lycan’s arguing for LOTH is very successful. He shows many of its
rivals to be less powerful, most notably connectionism which argues is either flawed
or incorporated, and his argument stands up to attacks from many different angles.
Furthermore, the argument has a high intuitive appeal, which some would even
argue appears to be a priori, and it appears to accurately explain how thought occurs
via a simple analogy to language, which also works in its favor. However, I would
argue that Lycan does not acknowledge the strongest argument for LOTH, the fact
that it is also able, potentially, to explain how human beings come to have language
itself, possibly a flaw in his argument but definitely not in his version of the theory.

-5-
Nick Fletcher PH317

Bibliography:
Ayede, M. (2004). ‘The Language of Thought Hypothesis’, The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy.
Lycan, W. (1993). ‘A Deductive Argument for the Representational Theory of
Thinking’, Mind & Language, Vol.8, No.3, pp.404-422
Stalnaker, R. (1993). ‘What is the Representational Theory of Thinking? A Comment
on William G Lycan’, Mind & Language, Vol.8, No.3, pp.422-430

-6-